Epilogue
The bus drive had taken forever, crammed in a small space with the fat, sweaty man beside her taking more room than should be allowed by law. The fact that he kept crushing peanuts and throwing them in to his mouth for two straight hours hadn't helped matters. In all truthfulness, when she later tazed him in to unconsciousness and had left him slumped in his own filth in the restroom of their last rest-stop, it had been more like a public service act than an actual assault. Plus she needed to properly test the device.
It had also made for a much more pleasant trip for the last three hours before Alexa Bean reached her destination.
When she'd picked up the tazer, along with a couple of fake ID's and a lovely dream-catcher, it had been nothing but a whim. Just a few things that had caught her eye when she had been searching the Impala's trunk for cuffs and a first aid bag. A few trinkets that were part of Sam and Dean's life.
She hadn't exactly planned to use the electrical weapon like this, but now that her initial plans had to be adjusted to Dean's departure and being forced to leave her gun behind in order to board a public transportation, it had suddenly become something very handy to have around.
She booked a room for the night, a foul smelling thing with paintings of fish all over the walls and a couple next door that did nothing but fuck all night long. But the tazer needed to be recharged and she had to make sure that everything was going to work perfectly the next day. She'd learned from her past mistakes, and she had studied hard, planned things better this time around. She had found the perfect way to get to Sam again, and she was not going to screw it up.
The walk to the salvage yard was long enough and hot enough to give her the look that she was hoping for. Alexa adjusted the pillow under her baggy clothes and knocked on the door of the shabby house, ignoring the leashed, barking dog.
A scruffy, bearded man with a baseball hat on his head and a grease-stained shirt, opened the door just enough to get a look at her. The hand that wasn't visible to her was surely carrying some sort of weapon, but Alexa wasn't worried. To anyone looking, she was just another very pregnant woman, red face flushed with exhaustion and sweat pooling in her rumpled clothes.
"Can I help ya?" Bobby asked, suspicion marking every sound coming from his mouth.
Alexa smiled shyly, one hand whipping at the beads of sweat in her forehead. "Oh, I'm so glad there's someone home! My car broke down, and my cell's battery died on me... I thought I was done in," she started, sweet little-town's girl voice, urging the old hunter to buy in to her act. "Could I please use your phone, mister? And possibly a glass of water, if you would be so kind?"
She saw the moment when Bobby's astute eyes traveled down her body and focused on the prominent belly. No matter how untrusting and savvy the hunter was, there was no way he would deny assistance to a woman in distress, she knew that.
"Come on in," Bobby said, an almost-smile stretching his bearded cheeks. "Ya not gonna pop that kid in the next five minutes, r'ya?"
Alexa giggled, closing the door behind her. "Oh, no need to worry yourself... this one wont be born so soon," she said, one hand gently tapping the strapped pillow while the other reached in to her purse to grab the tazer. "I can't tell you how glad I am to have find you, Mr. Singer."
The end
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Chuck looked at the finished page and leaned back. Whatever the point was in writing this stuff, it was lost to him, particularly stories like this one that had absolutely nothing to do with Lilith and the 66 seals.
But the scary angel had told him to write and Chuck, who could never -ever- be accused of fighting the Man, obeyed.
"Is it finished?" The male voice asked, the sound coming from the dark corner of the motel room that Chuck had rented for the month.
After coming face to face with his creations... or rather, after learning that Sam and Dean were real –really scary- guys and that Dean had no trouble in dragging him in to the middle of all the crap that the Winchesters dealt with on a daily basis, Chuck had beat a strategic retreat and abandoned his house in search of some peace and quiet and possibly some alcoholic numbness. One out of three was the best he could get.
The peace and quiet had gone to hell when the same angel that had scared the crap out of him when he'd had his vision of the end, had followed him and had decided to sit around, waiting for Chuck to finish his latest story. Which was, you know, just something that he'd, honestly, seen coming. Literally. Because his life was miserable like that.
He didn't even bother asking why this particular angel was so invested in making sure that he didn't warn the Winchester about anything or why he'd been ridding Chuck's ass for every hour, of every day, of the last couple of weeks. Didn't angels have other stuff to do... like smite some locusts or something? Maybe kill some first-borns? Flood a village or three?
Snatching the last printed page from the ancient printer that he'd brought with him, Chuck gathered all of them and handed the last part of the story to the waiting angel. "It's finished," Chuck announced miserably.
Maybe now he could curl up in his bed and disappear in a haze of alcohol induced stupor. Hopefully one that didn't evolve in to any sort of prophetic dreams about Sam or Dean. Or Sam and Dean. Or Castiel. He was tired of those guys. Why couldn't he have prophetic dreams about Scarlett Johansson?
"This is not an appropriate ending," the angel said, sounding a lot like Chuck's fifth grade teacher telling him that 'it was not appropriate to go around lifting girls' skirts, no matter how curious he was'.
"It... it's not?" Chuck ventured around the nail that he was biting.
"This Alice woman knocks on Bobby's door and he lets her in... you say nothing more about her, obviously, ill intentions, you don't even say anything about what happened to the Winchesters after the cold bath," the angel pointed out, using his fingers to number the things that he hadn't like. "That's no conclusion. Do you not know what happens next?"
"I do... I mean, I sort of dreamt it last night... and there was the flash this morning, in the show-... er... yeah, I know what happens next."
"Then why is not written?"
Chuck ran a hand over his curly hair, eyeing the scotch bottle like it was a life-vest for his drowning sanity. "I was thinking of maybe giving it a ... you know, open, sort of ending," he explained. "Author's sometimes use them because it... it keeps readers guessing, I suppose..."
The angel was openly glaring at him, one brow raised in clear disbelief. "I am aware of what an open ending means," he explained in turn. "This, however, is not that sort of story."
"It's not?"
The angel advanced towards the frightened writer, two steps landing him right inside his personal space. Chuck, being the small guy that he was, leaned back in a feeble attempt to escape. He ended up falling on his ass on top of the couch, which only made the angel look even bigger and more menacing. "How would you have liked if Moses had written the story of the Hebrew's exodus from Egypt like that? If he'd just gotten to the parting of the Red Sea and figured that it would be 'artistic' to end his story with 'and the Egyptians defied Him and walked in to the middle of giant walls of water?'"
Chuck wanted to point out that he was not Moses and that he could barely lead a blind old lady across the street, much less thousands across the desert, but given that he was talking to a suite-wearing, fat angel and writing about two very screwed up guys, Chuck figured that was a moot point. Plus, he hadn't actually read the Bible. He had no idea how Moses had ended his story. The Charlton Heston version, though, was kick-ass. "I guess I could do a short epilogue?" He asked, more than offered.
The angel smiled and pointed to the empty seat in front of the waiting laptop. "I think that would be wise."
qºLºp
""You are the Mr. Singer of the Singer Salvage Yard, right?" Alexa asked matter-of-factly, accepting the glass of cool water from Bobby's hands with a smile. She knew that he wasn't offering her just tap water; she knew that he would want to make sure that she was not a demon. She could do that much, keep the old man happy and unsuspicious.
"That would be me alright," he said with a nod. 'But Bobby's just fine."
The water did taste funny to her, but still she drank it to the end. She needed just a few seconds to take the tazer from her purse and zap Bobby, but before that could happen, he needed to trust her enough to turn his back on her. The man had enough white hair in his beard and in the wisps of hair that escaped the dirty cap, but Alexa doubted that he was slow by any means.
"I was starting to think that I was gonna die by the side of the road, until I saw your yard's sign up ahead," she said with a properly relieved tone of voice, her eyes turned earnest and trusting. "Not a living soul for mile around these parts."
"Yeah... aren't many folks around here," Bobby replied, his eyes never leaving her face. "Not the best place to have car trouble, I tell'ya that... all sorts of folks in this world and not all of them are very nice."
Alexa was starting to feel uncomfortable under his close watch, her fingers itching to get around her weapon and move on with her plan. Dean was gone and Sam had escaped before she could get to him and even Chuck was nowhere to be found. Her only link with the Supernatural's characters was Bobby and his auto-shop. With Dean dead, he was the only way that she had to make Sam walk right in to her hands.
The sound of heavy footsteps on the stairwell leading to Bobby's second floor called Alexa's attention around. She turned to look, the world spinning out of control with her movement. She grabbed the wall beside her to stop from falling flat on the floor, feeling the solid surface undulate under her fingers as the dizziness refused to go away. The water...
"Hi, Alexa," the man coming down the steps greeted her with a smile in his face. "I was looking forward to meet you."
Alexa forced her eyes to focus on his face. "Sam..." she whispered, looking in confusion between the two men. Sam was smiling... Dean had died less than a week ago, and Sam was smiling? "I don't understand..."
"Oh, don't you worry your pretty little head, girl" Bobby said, a nasty smile creeping up his face. "You'll never will..."
It was the last thing Alexa ever saw before everything went black and weightless.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
"So, the sister was dead all along?" Dean asked, his back against the bed that Bobby had insisted on dragging from the out-shack to settle his 'sick as a dog' ass on. Bobby's words, not his.
Sam nodded, holding another piece of printed-paper for his brother to read. It was the first chance that they really had to catch up on what had happened to Dean and what Sam had found out about the woman who'd taken him and both were taking full advantage of it.
After their bathtub chat, or the ultimate sappy and wet chick-flick moment (that Dean alternated between saying never happen and blaming on him being delirious with fever), Sam had just stuffed his brother full of aspirin and driven to Bobby's like the devil was on his tail.
Dean's fever had spiked again in the middle of the road but somehow they'd managed to get to the Salvage Yard in more or less one piece, glad to find a recently arrived Bobby back there too.
Later, when they'd read the police report on the fire and learned that no bodies had been found in the house, it had been Sam who had realized that, given Alice's history, she wouldn't give up on her obsession so easily and that, since Chuck had apparently dropped from the face of the Earth, Bobby's scrap-metal yard was the only link that she had left to reach Sam.
Bobby had been waiting for her to haunt his steps for days when she finally showed up, the plan to get rid of her already set and ready to put in to practice. All that they were missing was their main guest.
A shoe-size, carton box replaced Sam's pile of papers on Dean's lap.
"What's this?" Dean asked wearily. "Her head?"
"Well... when I didn't see your cassette tapes in the car, I figured she'd taken them and that they were still inside the house when it... you know," Sam said, sheepish look on his face and still managing too look very pleased with himself at the same time.
Dean tore the box open like it was early Christmas, his eyes lighting up when he saw the titles inside. Unlike most of his hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs, the box was filled with originals of all the stuff he loved. "Sam... this is... this is too awesome to be called awesome!"
Sam rubbed his head, his pleased smile opening in to a satisfied grin. It had been nearly impossible to find all of those on such a short notice, but after all that they'd been through, after all that had happened to Dean in the past month, Sam didn't really want to drive anywhere without Dean having his stuff back. Especially after the reaction his brother had had over finding out that Alice hadn't destroyed his amulet after all and that it was safely kept in Sam's pocket.
"Did you want her head instead?" Sam asked, when he saw the grin slowly waning from his brother's face until it was replaced by a preoccupied look.
Dean set the box in the bedside table and closed it with care, like the tapes inside where made of fragile glass instead of plastic and magnetic tape. It was bad enough that Sam already thought he was too weak to do his job; it was bad enough that he'd had the shit beat out of him by a demon that Sam was able to waste all on his own... now he had also failed to get himself away from a simple civilian. It was too embarrassing to put to words.
"I can't believe that I bought half her crap," Dean eventually said, more out of surprise than self-depreciation, as he picked at the splinter in his left hand fingers.
"Quit picking on that," Sam warned for the hundredth time the last hour. "Besides, the woman was insane. You couldn't really try to use logic to reason with her or even understand her enough to get one step ahead of her."
"Yeah, well... guess we'll never know," Dean offered, resting his head against the stack of pillows that Sam had stuffed behind his back. The weight of his own head made his broken collarbone ache whenever he tried to stay upright for too long and Dean was secretly thankful to his brother for all the fuss that he'd been 'subjected' to for the last couple of days.
"What I would love to know," Bobby's voice announced from the bedroom door, "is why this kind of crap always happens to you two idjits."
Because 'our prophet' writes trashy novels, Dean thought. "You took care of her?" Dean asked instead, serious eyes searching Bobby's face.
The older man nodded. "Spell worked like a charm, everything wiped clean like a newborn baby's hide... you won't have to worry about her anymore."
"And no one suspected a thing?" Dean asked, back to picking on his splinter.
Bobby raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms in front of his chest.
"Right... it's you we're talking about," Dean translated the look on the older man's face. "Just asking, you know... no need to get all prissy on me," he added with a smile. It was just that he felt bad for dragging Bobby in to cleaning up their mess. Again.
"Glad to help, boy," Bobby said, easily as if he'd heard the young man's thoughts, reading the guilty expression on his face all too well. "That's what family's for, remember?"
"She's getting off too easy, if you ask me," Sam vented. He had left Alice for Bobby to deal with as he saw fit and didn't really questioned the older man when he'd presented his plan, but if Sam ever happened to come across the guy responsible for letting Alice out of that hospital in the first place, he would deal with him in a very different way.
"Not really her fault, you know," Dean reminded his brother. He didn't like the glint of revenge that he could see in Sam's eyes. And yes, for the time he'd been her prisoner, Dean had wanted nothing more than to tear Ale- Alice limb from limb. But now that he'd had time to cool off, now that he was properly doped on good painkillers and had nothing more to fear than death by extreme-boredom on daytime TV, he could see that she was only doing what was hardwired in to her brain. She was being who she was.
He couldn't and would never understand the concept of mental illness, but Dean knew all to well how it felt like to be losing your mind and not being able to deny what you were, no matter how much you hated it.
"She tried to burn you alive," Sam reminded him. Like it was something that Dean was likely to forget.
"Not to mention the number she did on ya shoulder," Bobby pitched in. That hadn't been fun to fix, he could guarantee them that.
"Yeah, well," Dean said with half a shrug that still managed to raise a sting from his wound. "If you ask me, it's all Chuck's fault and his full-frontal descriptions... girls can't help but go nuts over me," he added with a sly smile and a wriggle of eyebrows.
Bobby huffed and puffed, clearly finding the whole concept ridiculous. Fans, out there, actually mooning and swooning over these two boys... what would they come up with next? Cuddly white sharks?
"You know, this whole thing does raise a scary question," Sam said, his frown deep enough to hide a truck.
"How often does Chuck gets his rocks off with our sex life?" Dean offered.
The shudder in Sam's and Bobby's bodies was simultaneous. After some collective brain-bleaching moment, Sam went on. "Well, other than that... we have to wonder, how many more of these fans are out there and just how many of them are just as unbalanced as Alice?"
Dean seemed to pale a bit at that and even Bobby was nervously scratching his head over the ever-present cap.
Sam wouldn't have even brought the subject up, at least not after what had happen to Dean, but he'd seen the online communities, he'd read some of the things that fans had posted there. It seemed to be an abnormal number of them who really liked to see them bloody in a multitude of ways. And it wasn't just him and Dean. Bobby seemed to have his own growing legion of followers as well. And that was just the ones with access to computers and Internet. Who was to know whom else was out there, reading Chuck's books?
"They can't all be crazy, can they?" Bobby ventured. From the way fat beads of sweat were swiftly gathering in the man's forehead, Sam was sure that he'd done his own research too.
"Come on guys… what are the odds?" Dean asked, the smile in his lips not quiet matching the panic in his eyes.
The awkward silence that settled in the room said more than any lengthy speech. Each and everyone one of them knew perfectly well that, with the kind of luck they had, the odds were pretty damn high.
"I'm going to kill Chuck," Dean mumbled, sliding down the bed sheets and giving up on the matter.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o
The woman had been brought by a family friend, a good Samaritan soul that had searched for her after her medical release and had found her wondering the streets, two states over. The usual background check had been made, based on her fingerprints and the previous medical records that the man who'd brought her had been able to provide. Alice Gean, as she was later confirmed to be, should have never been released from the institution where she had resided for most of her life, even after her parents' death. She was a potential danger to others and, as it was proved by the condition she arrived in, she was a danger to herself.
For over 700 years, the Alexian Brothers Foundation had existed to provide health care for those who could not provide for themselves.
They were there to provide help for people like Alice, mentally ill and unable to support or guarantee their own safety. The time that she had spent unattended in the outside world had left its mark. She was violent, she was hostile and she couldn't remember a thing from the past five years. It would take time, but with care and patience, Alice Gean would be a person again. Or at least, she would gain some peace with herself.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
Chuck looked at the angel, seated on the couch, reading the last pages like a vulture of an editor, breathing down his neck over a deadline. The writer gulped the remaining drops of beer from his bottle and tried to read the expression on Zachariah's face. He was sweating by the time the angel looked up and sneered his approval.
Chuck swallowed the bile in his mouth and gave a relieved sigh, turning to the computer one more time. He typed just two more words.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o
The end (for real!)
AN: The Alexian Brothers Foundation, oddly enough, its real. Here's the link for their page:
AN2: Well, this is it, people. It's been a wonderful, lovely ride and I can just hope that it's been as fun for you as it has been for me. There's a new story in the oven, but summer time is here and I'm gonna work myself some tan in the mean time. Hugs for all, and I'll see you all around :o)
